


Baby Blue

by sneezingbees



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Domestic, F/M, Marriage, No beta we die like illiterates, Pregnancy, Slavery, it's a babyfic!, it's a legionsocietyfic!, it's a wifefic!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:01:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27420868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sneezingbees/pseuds/sneezingbees
Summary: The other woman said, “It’s better than the way I was before. Look – I’ve got pearl earrings, a nice house; we eat meat and fruit every day. Hell, we eat every day.” She looked at Clementine, “What I’m trying to say is, you can have a nice life. Don’t make things difficult for yourself.”“Mm.”“You aren’t a captured wife, are you?” The word she used was rapta; meaning caught, seized, snatched. Assaulted.Clementine shook her head.“Then there you are, cara. You chose this life. Accept it."The Legion win, Vegas falls. Two women are taken into the new society, one willing and one not, and must begin to make something of their lives.
Relationships: Female Courier/Lanius, Female Courier/Vulpes Inculta, Lanius (Fallout)/Original Female Character(s), Lucius (Fallout)/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 46





	1. All Roads

Prologue: Clementine

***

i. When the baby is born, it all comes too fast. The women had come to her room the day before, feeling the stomach where her husband’s son sits plump and proud like a sultan from a story. Sits is the word: he is feet down and head up, little elbows at either side as though he cradles something in his arms. As though he holds her, rather than the other way around.

“Here’s his head,” a woman says with a gentle press. “Feel him under your ribs?”

“Like an apple,” she whispers.

“He’s big. Nice and fat.”

 _His, he, him._ Only ever allow for the possibility of a boy: do not dare to think of a girl or you will make it true. Do not dwell on girl’s names you like; no Lilies, no Rosalines, no sweet little girl called Honey with soft flaxen hair. Do not think of ringlet curls or eyelashes like duck down, feathering a pink cheek as soft as a petal. No – do not think at all.

So that is what she did.

She tried not to think when she felt a shocking twinge between her legs in the day before, tried not to think when she woke sick in the night dripping in the sheets. Her husband would leave her bed next week, when the nurses thought it was time and she would sweat the final stretch alone. But not yet, it was not time: that is what she says when she flinches in the dingy twilight, something bursting between her legs and soaking the blankets.

_Not yet. It is not time._

But the water can’t go back, once it is out. Like a leaf breaking from a bough, falling down and down; like a glass shattering against a wall. There are things in nature which cannot be undone (although it feels in that moment that she herself is coming undone). It is all too soon and she is not ready, her husband should not be here, it is bad luck and where there was water on the bed (on the good sheets) there is sticky blood and sweat and they call for the women to come but she does so much alone, so much pain alone whilst her husband is sent out into the street. He will be pacing the ground like an ox stabled too early; restless, impatient. Anxious.

In the small hours of the morning, when dawn spreads pink clouds over a yellow sky, her little sultan comes. Out feet first; tiny and sticky and small and stubborn. There is a sheen of thin mucus over him, like a miasma. She thinks that he is a lump; he has dropped out of her like a stone and she holds him heavy in her arms. The women are looking at the tears between her legs, they are inspecting the placenta. All she can do is cup his head in her palm and feel his hair as soft and brown as a dormouse.

“He looks like you,” she says, and Lanius touches the top of his son’s head with a gentle hand. 

ii.

She had been a Follower, once, in the time before.

She’d come from old Boneyard stock: her people came from not the city itself, but the villages and outposts which scratched their living up beyond its walls. Her family had been labourers mostly, of the unskilled variety, until her grandad learned how to weld with the Followers and taught all the men in the family. The women stayed at home and kept the work they always had: feeding chickens, feeding children, feeding the men who came home tracking in soot and oil. She remembered the arms of her father lifting her up and the lumpy burns all along his wrist up to the shoulder; white and glistening like the underbelly of a fish. Her little childlike hands would grasp at them, as though they were tape that could be pulled off.

Her husband now has different scars; long, puckered lines along his back which rise like barrows. Fingers which don’t sit straight; knuckles sunken on the right hand. And burns, too; along the left side of his face like a permanent shadow, mottling his skin light and dark. _A gun powder explosion_ , he’d told her, _a long time ago._ He lets her touch them and feel the sunken spots near his brow. She does not try to peel them off.

As a girl she had been determined not to succumb to the same dull existence as her mother and cousins and sisters; she would not straighten the gingham tablecloth and wash men’s shirts in a tin basin until the day she died. So she solicited the Followers and took their school exam when she turned ten. She had to do the oral reasoning exam because she could not read or write, but she passed it with flying colours: they marked her out as _gifted_. What an accolade. Put her in a special program and taught her letters, taught her science, taught her a trade. She was going to build roads. Well, she wouldn’t do the building: she’d do the _engineering_. She’d manage the local labourers and wear that blazing red cross on the back of her shirt, surveying the local geology with a frown and advise on materials, execution. The work took her out of the Boneyard into the Colorado. The Followers wanted to reach out to isolated communities, provide lifelines which could lead them to the beating heart of civilisation. A road was civilisation: it was a way to better yourself. It was a way to the city, to market, to trade and to the world. That was the idea, anyway.

Of course, the road network was riddled with Frumentarii. They hadn’t realised that then: hadn’t known what an interest the Legion had in the Followers’ version of tribal outreach. How it differed from the Legion’s own plans. She had been naïve and thought her work was neutral. Ever the trap Followers fell into. Still.

Who could object to a road?

Certainly, Vulpes Inculta hadn’t seemed to when he’d infected their Mojave road network in the late 2270s. It still gave her that queasy feeling when she saw him at parties now; that she’d known him before and he had been someone else. How he had changed his face.

Of course, it was a source of endless amusement to Inculta that he had tricked Lanius’ _educated_ wife. He would say, “It’s alright, _fructula._ Better women than you have fallen for my charms.”

 _Fructula?_ Who was he to call her _fructula_? It’s all she can do not to throw her drink in his face; it’s all she can do to resign herself to a scoff. “Your _charms?_ I seem to remember thinking you physically incapable as a day labourer. I would have never hired you; you’re lucky the foreman did.”

“Ah, yes, my infiltration of enemy camps: purely down to luck. Fortuna was not so blessed.”

Then Lanius is there, putting his arm on her waist. Preventing her from going too far, getting too rude. Tempering Vulpes to the same ends. “My wife built the road to Vegas, Inculta. What’s your wife managed? Besides whelping too many daughters.”

They look over at Vulpes’ wife, who stands across the room in a clutch of women. She is small, a little sickly, a little frail. Thin brown hair, freckles, a terracotta dress. Shaking gently, even when stood perceptively still, like an autumn leaf. They have three daughters together; three children under three.

“Not for want of trying,” Vulpes mutters by way of response. They disperse.

Later, in the dark of their bedroom, she is needled by this moment. So what if Inculta’s wife only had "daughters? Was that her fault? (Yes: Legion thought women chose the sex of the child). But still: so what? She had been a daughter once.

“Is that all I am worth?” she whispers. “Sons?”

“Hmm?” Lanius’ expression is bemused in the gloom. A man jumped by a question his wife is posing, without context, on a conversation hours earlier. “ _Oh_ , that. Don’t worry about that. I only said it to get Inculta’s back up.”

She traces the faded marks on his shoulders; the lumpen barrow of scars. “It got my back up too.”

He catches her hand, “You know your worth.”

Her fingers curl in his palm; “Tell me again.”

“Games, woman, games.”

“Don’t you enjoy playing games?”

He pauses in the dark, and is sincere. “I always enjoy your company.”

She settles on her back and closes her eyes. In the dark she just about hears him say, “And I know you shall give me a son.” Then she is not sure that is what he said and she turns back to him. His gentle snoring fills the room and she is alone again.

iii.

When they hold the child aloft, when the boy comes screaming to her breast and clings like ivy, where does the girl go? Where the little daughter that could have been, where the ringlets and ribbons and soft knit dresses? The lilies wither and fade; honey loses all flavour and dries. Here is the boy, and he is your son. All other future is eclipsed. Do not dwell: _what if it had not been a boy?_ It is a boy. Hush, woman.

She had had another name before; another life before. Now she is Clementine (her old name had been too difficult for Latin speakers, apparently). Wife, mother, and Legion. Her old self with its sharpness and an embarrassing not-even-Boneyard family and _gifted_ and that Follower degree – she is gone.

It does not do to dwell on a future that is no longer yours.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fructula ,= little fruit


	2. Dolor

Clementine

***

i.

It is ten days.

Ten days alone nursing in the dim light, ten days alone with a child who seems afraid to open his eyes and will only peek out through cracked lids; offering a secretive glance at Clementine with eyes of silty grey.

She has gone – or been taken – to the neighbourhood’s _casa feminarum_ ‘house of women’. This is where she will spend her time until the tenth day, a Sunday, when Lanius the butcher will come to take her home. The only males here are the little newborns, pink and clawless and with a desire to conquer nothing more than their mother’s breast. These houses – _casae_ – there is one in every neighbourhood and they are a relic of the Legion breaking up families when they formed their camps and kingdom. Daughters had been taken from mothers and grandmothers; there had been nobody to tell them how to nurse their child, what pain was normal; nobody to take the infant from them in the night and let them sleep. The men wouldn’t do it – they were out fighting with the desert. In the war camps, the women had gathered to watch one another’s babies and old female slaves who had been put out to pasture would pass mornings watching the infants squall. There, the casa had been a tent; white and with a brazier lit out front for helpers to pass their hands over and purify themselves. Here, in Vegas, it is an old church. Clementine can read the English text over the entrance arch: _Our Lady of Perpetual Succour._ In a haze, she thought it said _sacchar_ when she is walked in; _Our Lady of Perpetual Sugar_.

She thought it sounded nice.

ii.

When had she known she was pregnant with this boy? It had taken a while.

Her periods were lethargic and often late; a common complaint amongst the rangy women of the wasteland. The night in question, she and Lanius were already married and going together to a party: a celebration of a friend’s birthday. Lucius. He was fifty years old and officially retired; he was also warming the villa he had been gifted by Caesar for his service. The villa was on _Via Candor_ , one of the nicest streets in New Vegas: all clean red sandstone and desert gardens blushing with roses and purple lilies. Vulpes Inculta was a close neighbour, although he had bought his house outright rather than being gifted it. Clementine and Lanius lived a ways across the city – in an unfashionable neighbourhood, where they still had problems with geckos coming in through the garden and you could hear the roar of Westside industry every morning around five.

Lucius’ wife was a good hostess – she was only a couple years younger than Lucius and they had been together almost twenty-five years. A meeting in the Denver campaign; she’d been a merchant hawking cotton in one of the Legion trading markets. Keen, smart. Her hair was long and grey now, coiffed with silver wire and she wore pearl drops in each ear. Unusually, she had kept her old name and went by Annalise. The native Legion had struggled with the last syllable, pronouncing the name ‘An-na-liss-ey’ _._ She had no qualms with correcting them, ‘Anna _leese_ , _cara,_ Anna _leese_.’

Lanius got it right; “Annalise, this is Clementine.”

Then he left her in Annalise’s care; the other woman quickly pressed a drink in her hand. Something golden brown.

“Clementine,” Annalise says, “What, was your old name not good enough?”

“Too difficult,” Clementine said.

“That’s what they say about my name, _cara_ ,” Annalise said. “But they learn it just the same.” She plucked an orange slice out of her drink and bit the flesh. “Well, most of them do. Some of my husband’s dunderhead colleagues still have issues. But I suspect putting on shoes is a struggle for them.”

Clementine laughed delightedly and Annalise went on; “It would be one thing if Lucius’ colleagues were Frumentarii; they’ve got a few thoughts knocking together up there. But my god, _Praetorians?_ They make a career out of getting punched in the head. You can imagine the small talk.”

Clementine gasped another laugh and dared to say; “I hope you charge their wives daycare.”

“Oh, I do. Lucius collects the interest.”

“Whereas some of the Frumentarii I’ve met,” Clementine lowered her voice. “They’re so arrogant, they’d charge _me_ for the pleasure of their company!”

“Ah, and who do you refer?” Annalise raised a delicate dark eyebrow. She lowered her voice pointedly; “It isn’t, by any chance, the wretch snivelling his way across the room currently?”

A cold shudder went through Clementine as she tried to subtly check back over her shoulder; of course. Vulpes Inculta was laughing courteously with Lucius, quaffing a cup of bitter Colorado wine. He caught her eye and Clementine whipped her head back, staring furiously at the floor.

“Oh God.”

“Oh God?” Vulpes’ ears were sharp and he smiled warmly at Annalise. “Good evening to you both. Annalise, you’re looking well.”

“Vulpes, where’s that wife of yours? I thought we’d see her here,” Annalise said.

“Ah, at home,” Inculta’s expression became a mock of concern and he laid his hand across his stomach. “Woman’s troubles, you know.” _Dolor feminae_ was the idiom he used; the pain, or punishment, of a woman.

Annalise’s jaw dropped, “Leave that poor girl alone!”

“We are in love, and she is beautiful. _Ita_ , _coniugium_ _noster fructus fert_.” _Thus, our marriage bears many fruits._ Vulpes smiled again and looked at Clementine. Clementine thought she felt something touch her waist, but as she shuddered there was nothing there – only a hair, or the brush of an insect perhaps. He said nothing, but glanced down at her stomach and smiled again before moving on to talk to a man. She remembered when he called her _fructula_ and her lips curled.

Annalise watched him go and said; “His wife is a _rapta_ , you know.” _Rapta_ : a captured wife. Not one who gave herself freely to her husband, but one whose husband knew her exact worth for he had paid it himself.

“Yes,” Clementine said distantly, “I’ve seen her around.”

“He’s wasting her away,” Annalise said. “I’ve seen it before. He probably keeps her stuffed in a cupboard until it’s the time of the month to pester her again.”

“Mm.”

Clementine felt a little sick then, and Annalise sat down with her. They talked about different, better things and Clementine found herself warming to the other woman. She’d been married to Lanius for a while, but this was her first time out in the city since Lanius had had work to do sorting out some business with the remnants of a Brotherhood of Steel bunker. Horrible business, she gathered. Wives had to stay with their husbands wherever they were posted; she couldn’t count on being tucked away in some safe city villa. So she had been flitting around in a Legion outpost on the edge of the Mojave, sewing cushions and staring at the ceiling in their room. She’d found a book of learning French and practised it in the mirror; she tried a little with Aurelius of Phoenix’s wife but the other woman had thought her terribly conceited.

Eventually, a point in the night was reached where a cake was brought out. It was a _rota plaustri_ , a cartwheel: big and round, soaked with seeds and honey. Clementine had always loved the taste of honey, which had been a rarity around the Boneyard; she said so to Annalise who got her a nice big slice. But as soon as she bit into the syrupy cake, bile climbed its acid ladder in her throat and she felt sick again. Then she was sick. Then she remembered when she had felt this way before and burst into tears.

“ _Cara, cara_ ,” Annalise shook her by the shoulder gently. “What is the matter?”

“N-nothing,” Clementine gasped. “Just-” she reaches for the Latin phrase she’d heard Inculta used before; “ _Dolor feminae_.”

“ _Dolor_!” Annalise snorted, and then took her in her arms. “Shh. _Florula_.” _Florula_ meant little flower and how little and precious Clementine felt then. How sweet to be held and loved; to have her back rubbed and be kissed on the shoulder. _Cara, cara_. Darling, darling. _Mella, amata_. Honey, lovely. _Est omnis bene._ All is well.

iii.

In the dark of the _casa feminarum_ , she pads across the tiles with bare feet holding her child. He has been moaning for hours and she is reluctant to feed him immediately; her breasts are sore and a nipple has begun to bleed. He has reached a point where he is only grizzling now and he is held so close in her arms, Clementine can feel his little heart beat against hers.

The walls of the place are washed in pastels; clotted cream, rosy pink, delicate duck egg blue. It is like living inside of the petals of flower. In the alcove by the doorway, there is a dark wooden statue of a woman holding an infant. Her foot and the edge of her carved robes have been polished to a shine where in the centuries past people must have clutched at her and supplicated. Clementine looks at her in the dark and touches the smooth hem of her dress with a hand. The statue’s face is benevolent, impassive. The wooden infant serene.

In the morning, she asks another woman if she knows who the statue is.

“I don’t know,” comes the reply. “Just some woman.”

 _Aren’t we all_?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, yeah, not a lot of Lanius it must be said... we'll get there!


	3. Day in the Life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought it would be fun to have a chapter from Vulpes' wife POV (her name is Laeta). I think I might alternate them chapter to chapter. Sorry for any typos/mistakes... as ever, I write this in 10 minute bursts between my baby whingeing.

Laeta

***

i.

The baby is crying. The baby is always crying.

She lies there, rigid, a board. She could be a plank of wood floating down the Colorado, under the hot desert sun. She could float over the dam, then bump over the edge and she’d be away. She wouldn’t exist.

“ _Get up_ , woman,” her husband hisses. “Are you deaf?”

“No,” does she respond, or think it? She is out of the bed in a trance and her husband rolls over, bringing the soft beige sheets around himself so he is bundled like a baby himself. Swaddled.

She brings the baby out of the bed and the toddler is up now too, tugging on her night dress so she supposes she ought to go down to make breakfast and she does this in a fugue, a stupor. What’ll they have? Corn porridge, with a fried egg on top: golden and glorious, the yolk melting into gritty sand. The little toddler grumbles, mashing the egg into the corn porridge to make a yellow soupy mess. She is trying to wean her; the Legion like to take babies off the breast as soon as they can to make way for more children. _There is a space in your body_. _Use it_. As though she is something to be filled; the key in the lock. The flower in the pot.

 _The body in the grave_. _The neck in the noose_.

She could cry, she could scream, but her little girl is burbling and now the baby is quiet in the Moses basket and the eldest of their daughters, a solemn angel-face called Madeleina is downstairs and boiling water for breakfast tea. Her husband has washed and is fresh, he’s down the stairs and touching her soft waist with his hands still cold with water.

“Mm, _cara_ , I wasn’t too rough with you last night was I?” he kisses her neck. “You felt so good.”

She is a plank of wood, she is a golden egg.

“Mm.”

“We want our son, yes? Is he on the way?” he touches her stomach and it churns.

“Hmm, oh I don’t-” 

Madaleina interrupts, “Mama, will you pour the tea?” It is perfect: in the Legion the wife must stand at the head of the table and pour the pot and no other woman will do. She takes the clay teapot in her hand and lines up the cups, takes the spout up high to make froth when the liquid falls. Then she is pouring, pouring, flowing into something else.

“Thank you,” Vulpes Inculta takes his cup first and breathes the steam to clear his head. His eyes are closed and he doesn’t notice her gaze flickering to the butter knife and to his neck: back and forth back and forth.

_Could I? Would I?_

“Mama!” Madaleina calls. “The baby is awake!”

ii.

To market, to market. To buy a fat pig.

A nursery rhyme her momma had sung to her when she was small; now she has it in her head as she ties the ribbon of the toddler’s straw hat under her chin. To market, to market. To buy –

She glances down at the list she has written. _Fruit. Bread. Wine._

_Honey._

_Cheese._

“Mama! What will we buy?” Madaleina takes the toddler, little Lilia, in a soft pale hand. “Can I see the list?”

“Read it to me, and tell me if I’ve forgotten anything.”

“Yes,” Madaleina takes it and reads the Latin perfectly. She is a clever girl, and she will come to the market with her because Laeta needs her and that need is making her grow up too fast. Madaleina is six but she will talk to the market sellers when Laeta stares into space sometimes, she will make sure the eggs go on the top of the basket, she will notice the lemons are reduced and should be bought because Papa ( _dear_ Papa!) does so love a lemon cake in the mornings.

But first they go to the crèche to drop off Lilia so the toddler can play with her little friends and draw chalk shapes on the sidewalk. At the crèche, the women gathered around are hens and the children at their feet are yellow chicks. The chalk sticks are seeds and when Lilia picks up a piece it scratches on the floor like a bird’s foot in dust.

A hen appears with lovely brown feathers; a glossy new dress with silken red tassles. Preening, she says to Laeta, “Oh, have you heard? Lanius’ wife has had the baby.”

The _infans:_ a sexless blob. Boy or girl; that is all that matters, all Laeta cares to know.

“Oh, lovely,” Laeta says distantly. “A daughter? Or-?”

“Boy,” someone says. “Beautiful fat boy.”

Oh, God. Now Vulpes will be on her all the more with his impatience, never mind the fact that their own little baby is only five months old and not yet walking, crawling, scarcely rolling. _Lanius_ has a son, _Lucius_ had a son, the whole _world_ is bursting with boys and penises and chubby bald darlings yet all she can give him is girls girls girls with long hair and solemn eyes. Whilst she herself is fit to dissolve after every subsequent birth.

(Last time: two days in labour and a daughter to show. Her, bleeding and fading, waxing and waning, a month in the nadir of tears and blood and milk. Him, _God, woman. What sort of wife are you that you struggle to bear these girls?_ Except he didn’t say girl, he said _micae_. Crumbs. _What sort of woman are you that you bring me these crumbs?_ )

She feels Madaleina’s little paw digging into her own as the other women look at her to say something. The hen with the red-tasseled shawl turns away from her and murmurs something to a dark-haired woman at her side; they think if they talk Latin quickly she won’t be able to follow. _Me non comprenda Latine._ And they are half-right; the women talk differently to her husband and use different sleights in the language and she has to concentrate or else it trickles past her ears like rainwater. And she rarely cares to concentrate, so these moments pass through her as though they are currents in a river. A ripple and they fade.

“Mama, we should get to the market,” Madaleina says.

If Lanius’ wife has had the child then after a month they will name the baby and have a party. She will have to go with Vulpes and bring a cake and coo over how fat Lanius’ little boy is. How he has Lanius’ eyes, his strength, won’t the little tyke grow up to be a bruiser. The thought is enough to crumple her.

As her eyes film over with tears, she hears the flickers of the other women’s murmurings.

 _Rapta. Dolor. Vulpes Inculta_.

Her daughter’s little fingers dig into her wet palm.

iii.

He had bought her in a raffle.

It had been the chaos of the post-Hoover Dam world; chaotic in her eyes, smooth in the eyes of her husband as all the little cogs fit into place. She’d been a courier and confident that she knew the roads, knew the best routes out of the desert as the Legion tightened their net. Then it was May and the caravans were leaving, it was June and the desperate sharecroppers were fleeing the city. She had thought they’d have the summer; the Legion couldn’t possibly mount an attack on the Dam in the _summer_. Not in this heat: nobody fights in this heat. Not even dogs.

So she’d swapped couriering and presented herself as a guide who could skirt the Legion blockades and get people out of the desert. For a fee, of course. And as tensions heightened and the war grew less coherent, her prices had grown and grown and grown. By the end her fees were extortionate and she no longer knew why she charged. What would she do with the money? What could she buy? Where would she go?

Vulpes Inculta has asked her these questions before; he found her little backstory quite amusing. “ _Cara_ , wherever did you think you were going with all that _money_?” As though the idea of a woman having all that coin of her own was patently ridiculous. As though she had no idea how to spend it.

When he lectures her, when he teases her, she tries on various guises. She is silent, she is coy, she defers and moves away like water. These are all things she has had to learn: when first he had her, she knew nothing of men. Not men like him, anyway. She’d known loose men, tumbleweeds, dregs she found in bars who’d talk sweet and put her songs in a jukebox. She’d never known a man so cold and set in his ways: unrelenting as whitewater. Smashing her down, picking her up, smashing her back down on the riverbed.

So: the raffle. She blocks it out mostly, when the memory comes to her. That last night in the desert, a hot August fug and the dog star burning overhead. Scorching her retinas like a lighter. She was taking an NCR nobody who thought they were somebody to a drop-off point where an official NCR caravan would take over; they were crossing the desert with a few families and a pair of lovers. It was outside Primm, they’d bedded down, then they were woken roughly in the night and that was that. It was so simple, and she was still drunk; and there was a dog with yellow teeth snapping in her face as a fourteen year-old boy held it back on a leash. “En-cay-arr?” he’d hissed, “En-cay-arr?”

“No, we have papers –”

“ _California_ ,” another Legion boy muttered and their eyes were shining blackly. And there it was: her life in those flashing wet eyes of a child and the strings of spit hanging from a dog’s mouth. They took the NCR nobody and they took the female lover then they looked her up and down and saw some value in her for they took her as well. They left the rest as crumpled heaps in the desert: there were slaves aplenty, and after all, they’d need to feed what they took as they joined an ant’s line of dispossessed curling back to the capital.

“August, _amata_?” Vulpes Inculta’s breath was warm in her ears when he stood behind her, running his hands over her shoulders. “Didn’t you hear? We took the Dam in July.”

_Yes. That’s why my price was so high for running people out of the fringes._

_Oh, really? Must have missed the memo._

_Did you now? Well, I hope you got a raise._

Things she always imagined she’d be the woman to say: she imagined she’d be the woman to raise her chin and spit at his feet. But a world in which she could have been that prickly, proud woman was a world away from the chafing red marks left on her wrists as part of the slave convey, the sunburn peeling off her neck after hours out in the midday sun. Then the week in the holding pen, where the world burst into tears all around her and she stared at the wall as though if she tried hard enough she would disappear and join it. Then as a woman she was taken to auction: a room of warm bodies in the grand hall of a pre-war hotel; slaves dressed in flashing colours and white stump tickets with numbers on them. Men, wives, the laughter. She wore a green silk dress she’d never seen before when she was pulled up. They’d plaited her hair and there was a white ribbon at the nape of her neck; _my noose_ , she’d thought. The grime of that march and the holding pen had been scrubbed from between her nails and toes and ears but still there felt something gritty sat upon the surface of her skin. A black desert dirt, that she’d never get clean of.

It was a few years before he told her the price he’d paid. They were at a party with men and women floating around with their own delusions of superiority and he was laughing with a centurion. The centurion’s wife had a face like a block of cheese; unmoving but for a sheen of sweat. Vulpes with the quick Latin; “Oh my wife? Yes, she was a bargain. Five hundred. Had more in her pockets when they took her; much good those NCR dollars did her.” Ha-ha-ha.

He watches her face, to see if she has understood, and she betrays nothing.

He smiled when he bought her too; that same smile with those neat creamy teeth. Younger then, with his hair cropped close to keep from sticking to his skull whilst he worked out in the desert. A bruise purpling his temple from a trooper who’d gotten lucky; his hand flew into the air clutching the raffle ticket when she was called up. And the men around him laughed, he laughed, and she’d felt something hardening inside her as she took him in. _Him_. Her number was up with _him_.

It is all those moments she thinks of when she takes the butter knife in her hand each morning. All those women she has been and who have died in her. That proud woman she could have been, burned by the desert and lost in the holding cell. Each part of her has wilted holding that cool blade and scraping the butter across the toast every morning. But one will not.

She is sure of it.


End file.
